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Is Apple The New Microsoft?
Varg Vikernes writes "Even if you don't count Apple's actions this week as a potential threat to first amendment rights (Apple's crackdown on Web sites that love the company), they do nothing to bolster Apple's public image. In fact the company's success of late has yielded accusations of bullying and potentially unlawful business tactics, along with complaints about the fact that songs purchased from its iTunes music service don't work with music players other than its own. According to Forbes, to some these tactics sound like something Apple's neighbor to the North might employ. They wonder aloud Is Apple the New Microsoft?
There's a difference between not supporting rival products any more than you have to and actively looking for ways to smash the opposition. Has Apple got a track history of screwing over competitors as Microsoft has done with Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect, DR-DOS, OS/2, etc, etc, etc?
Pullying the clones was a sensible move. Rather than expanding the marketshare of Apple's OS by attracting Windows-based users to the MacOS fold, all the clones succeeded in doing was stealing hardware sales from Apple itself, which was harming Apple's income. The clones experiment was too little too late to make any dent in the Windows juggernaut and was hurting Apple more than it was helping it, so it had to end.
Apple not making a deal with BeOS was a decision that was based on several factors. One of which was the price - neither side really wanted to budge from their view of what the OS was worth - and another was the reappearance of Steve Jobs, who clearly favoured an OS based upon NeXT's OS, whether for technical reasons or personal vanity and vindication. Be could have easily cut a deal before Jobs was back on the scene, but they played hardball a little too hard and ended up with nothing.
As for Apple's stores in the UK undercutting UK resellers, well, I've talked to a manager at one of Apple's biggest UK retail resellers (Micro Anvika) and he said business was booming, even with the Apple London Store only a mile or so away from his company's flagship stores in Tottenham Court Road, so it's hardly as if Apple's UK resellers are crying about it. If anything, Apple's new retail presence and elevated brand awareness has reinvigorated the market, and encouraged resellers to improve on their value-add, which is no bad thing from a consumer point of view.
Even so, some of the biggest competition the UK resellers face is the disparity between Apple's UK and US pricing: it's long-established fact that it's considerably cheaper to buy a round-trip ticket to New York and pick up a PowerBook there than it is to buy the same PowerBook in the UK.
Is Apple a wannabe monopolist? Probably, yes. Which company isn't? But nothing it's done so far or anything that you've mentioned in your post is evidence of any monopolistic policy on Apple's part.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
OK, so hinting and anti-aliasing are different things. You can use both, or none, or one of either, it doesn't matter.
Hinting is about correctly grid fitting the pixels. It can (and should) be used at any size, but is most noticable at small sizes (which is most text on a computer screen). If you want to see text that isn't hinted, look at this.
So to say "hinting is ugly" is not correct: hinting by itself modifies glyph shapes, for the better (that's why people want it). As you can see from the picture, unhinted text is very ugly indeed - unpleasant to read in fact. What you probably mean is that some people don't like anti-aliasing. On Windows it's off by default,on Linux it's on but you can disable it globally very easily, and on MacOS X you cannot disable it without special purpose hacks that often break when you upgrade.
FreeType is capable of anti-aliasing and also using TrueType hinting, which it can do in one of two modes: automatic and by using the data embedded in the fonts. In automatic mode it tries to guess based on the shapes of the glyphs. The algorithms used are fascinating and developed specifically for FreeType, to work around the patent. However the autohinter doesn't always get it right so FreeType can also use the real hinting engine it is supposed to use, if you have a license.
"Font smoothing" is just another way of saying anti-aliasing, except in that thread you linked to where they appear to be using it to refer to what is normally known as sub-pixel anti-aliasing which exploits properties of how pixels are laid out on LCDs to make it look better. Microsoft calls this "ClearType". FreeType can do this too.
In short: hinting and anti-aliasing/smoothing are different things, which have different purposes. It's possible to have one without the other.